The very phrase is likely to send a shudder down the spine of the Wall Street Journal's traditionalists. Managing editor Robert Thomson informed staff late last week that he was creating a streamlined "news hub" at the paper's headquarters in downtown New York.

Ripping up the WSJ's byzantine command structure, Thomson named a national editor, a foreign editor and a front-page editor. For the US's top business paper - where, in the past, decisions were made through a network of bureau chiefs - that's a radical step.

In the latest in a series of top-level departures, Thomson's deputy, Laurie Hays, quit after 23 years to take a senior job at Bloomberg News. She follows the previous managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, out of the door as the old guard adjusts to life without the Bancroft family.

Six months on from Rupert Murdoch's takeover, the pace of change is unremitting. A ponderous culture of research, analysis and preparation is out. Breaking news, shorter stories, politics and sport are in. The WSJ will soon move to News Corp's New York headquarters.

"There's been a change in the basic philosophy of the newspaper," says Steve Yount, president of the IAPE staff union at Dow Jones."Anyone who spends $6bn on a newspaper is going to want to run it in the way they see fit."

For Murdoch, that means four daily dedicated foreign pages, less prominence for business and fewer of the WSJ's quirky front-page features which run to thousands of words. The new proprietor wants to create an organ of choice for the most influential and affluent newspaper readers in the country. He believes that involves shouting louder than the WSJ has done for much of its 119-year history.

When asked at a conference in California this month how the decline in newspaper readership could be arrested, Murdoch replied: "Produce better papers. Papers that people want to read. Stop having people write articles to win Pulitzer prizes. Give people what they want to read and make it interesting."

Subtlety and diplomacy are not strong suits at News Corp. As a sop to the more reluctant sellers in the Bancroft family, an independent committee was established to safeguard editorial integrity. But it wasn't consulted when Brauchli was encouraged to step down with a lucrative offer of a consulting job elsewhere in the Murdoch empire.

His replacement, Thomson, has told reporters he will not tolerate the cherished in-depth investigations that have the "gestation period of a llama".

One staffer told the Atlantic Monthly: "People are running around frightened and confused. The push is towards news, news, news."

Most striking is the shift on the front page. The Project for Excellence in Journalism calculated that business content on page one has dropped from 30% to 14% of the total. Politics has leapt from 5% to 18%, which can only partly be attributed to an exciting presidential primary season.

Designers are examining ways to shake up the WSJ's forbidding layout. A glossy magazine is due to be launched in September. But certain quirks remain intact - including the daily "A-head" feature at the foot of page one, which offers lengthy treatment of a subject many miles from the mainstream news agenda. This week's topics have included a renaissance in ventriloquism, the rise of US-style high-school proms in England and a depiction of a salvage yard for aircraft in the backwoods of Maine.

When Murdoch bought the Journal, rival papers mocked up spoof editions with images of semi-naked women plastered all over the front. An editorial in the New Republic lamented: "The prospect of the Aussie vulgarian lording over the paper has whipped up an end-of-days gloom across the nation's newsrooms."

Among WSJ staff, views are split but the atmosphere is tense. When Rebekah Wade appeared in the newsroom last month, a rumour began circulating that the editor of the Sun was about to be appointed to run the Journal. "The jury is out - views are divided, depending on people's backgrounds and what jobs they're in," says a reporter. "There are a lot of rumours about all kinds of things. Certain people are frustrated, a few are worried about their jobs."

Efforts are being made to reassure the troops. Thomson's newly appointed lieutenants - Matt Murray, Nikhil Deogun and Mike Williams - are long-serving Journal hands. In a memo describing the changes, Thomson said that Alix Freedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, would be given "expanded authority as a defender of the paper's ethical and journalistic standards".

The IAPE is keeping an open mind, pointing out that Murdoch is talking about recruiting journalists while rivals, such as the New York Times and Sam Zell's Tribune group, are making cuts to cope with weak advertising. On the Journal's shifts in coverage, Yount points out that changes at newspapers always provoke protests. "Some people are still upset that they put colour on the front page, that they reduced the width of the paper [in early 2007] and eliminated one of the columns," he says.

A revitalised WSJ will be a wily competitor. In an ominous sign for the Financial Times, Thomson said that there will be a push to build "editorial presence and profile" in the UK.

Then there is the website. After flirting with making access to the Journal's site free, News Corp has realised that business people don't blink at an annual fee of around $100 to access content from their desktops. Murdoch sees value in Dow Jones's newswires and told an audience at last week's Cannes advertising festival that the proportion of the company's revenue coming from digital businesses would rise from 50% to 75% within a few years.

But the path to profit in the media is far from straightforward. John Hartman, professor of journalism at Central Michigan University, says: "He paid too much for MySpace, he paid too much for the Journal. The cross-promotion he hoped to get between the Journal and Fox Business isn't going to happen." But he adds: "Murdoch is smart enough to know that if you start tampering with an institution people are used to, you run a big risk of losing advertisers and losing readers. The Journal's readers don't necessarily want this product that they're very loyal to, and that they rely on, to change very much."